Mobile phone firm O2 is embarking on an ambitious project to see if mobile phones and music can make money.
The company is producing its own digital music player that can store and play back recorded tracks as well as download new ones via a handset.
Downloaded tracks are expected to cost around £1.50 and O2 is currently looking for keen music lovers to test the service in May.
If the trial proves a success, the commercial service could be launched before the end of 2003.
The music player being made by O2 looks like the current crop of MP3 players and stores music on Compact Flash cards.
Before now many companies, such as Musicwave in France and T-Mobile in Germany, have let people download short clips of popular tunes or ringtones derived from the same songs.
None have so far let people download and store entire tracks because the average size of a music file recorded in the popular MP3 format is 3.5 megabytes, which is larger than the entire free memory available on all but the most up to date phones.
Such files would take a long time to download to a handset even via the fast GPRS technology many mobile networks now offer.
O2 has got around these problems by using a compression technology called Microkosm from US company Chaoticom that lets a near-CD quality track download in two minutes.
News source: BBC News
